A NEW national board to co-ordinate the activities of Scotland’s various enterprise agencies was announced yesterday.
Economy Secretary Keith Brown made the announcement following the first phase of the review of enterprise and skills services, which the Government hopes can help put Scotland among the top performing OECD nations.
The first major reform will be the creation of a new Scotland-wide statutory board to co-ordinate the activities of Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, including Scottish Development International, Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council.
Further reforms will protect services in the Highlands and Islands and create a similar new service for the south of Scotland.
Other reforms will see an acceleration of the delivery of the Trade and Investment Strategy and, through SDI, co-ordination of international activity across the public and academic sectors to ensure maximum benefit.
Another improvement will be to the data and evaluation functions to ensure the new board can provide the best advice across all agencies, and there will be more support to businesses on innovation, productivity, digital and exporting.
One of the key reforms will be the aligning of the functions of the learning and skills agencies to deliver the joined-up support that young people, colleges, universities and businesses need to increase sustainable economic growth.
According to the report, the Scottish economy grew 0.7 per cent over the year to Q2 2016, and GDP now stands 10 per cent higher than at the low point of the recession at the end of 2009.
The number of people in employment is currently 2,618,000, 54,000 above the pre-recession peak. The unemployment rate is currently 4.6 per cent, which is lower than the UK as a whole.
Other strengths include a strong performance on post-secondary qualifications, with one of the highest rates in the EU; more than £27 billion of international exports a year, an increase of more than 17 per cent since 2010; the highest level of private sector businesses since records began, an increase of 7.8 per cent between 2014 and 2015; and the second highest level of foreign direct investment projects in UK in 2015, behind only London.
In higher education, Scotland has five universities in the top 200 in the world, more than any other country per head of population except Luxembourg. There were 25,818 Modern Apprenticeship starts in 2015-16, above the target of 25,500, and Scotland has one of the highest rates of spend on higher education research and development in the OECD.
Brown said: “We are proud of our enterprise and skills agencies, and in recent years their efforts have contributed to real improvements in our economic performance.
“But we know that further improvement is required – our ambition is for Scotland to rank among the top performing OECD nations for productivity, equality, sustainability and wellbeing.
“This review has focused on how we can build on existing strengths and successes to further improve the enterprise and skills support system in Scotland. This will ensure a system in which all of our agencies work both hand in glove with each other and collaboratively with our business, academic and civic partners to optimise economic impact across Scotland.”
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